


I can't remember darkness except to dream

by girlsarewolves



Category: The Mummy (1999), The Mummy Returns (2001), The Mummy Series
Genre: F/M, HEA, Happily Ever After Ending, Modern Reincarnations, Modern Setting, Non-Graphic Smut, References to Dying/Death, Reincarnation, mild references to rape, references to femslash, very very minor and brief reference to femslash really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-17
Updated: 2014-03-17
Packaged: 2018-01-15 22:43:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1321945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlsarewolves/pseuds/girlsarewolves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is not the first time she has lived, but it is the first time she will find her own life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I can't remember darkness except to dream

* * *

She remembers dying. But the method often varies.

* * *

Nina is twelve when she first dreams of death violently rendering her cold and _still_ and _empty_. She is falling into a pit of crawling black and there are a thousand pricks aching all over her flesh, throbbing and numbing and some part of her mind knows that she is dying because this is all too familiar.

  
Her parents rush to her when she wakes sobbing and screaming in a language she's never heard before.

  
The dream comes back two nights later, but this time it is her own hands driving lukewarm metal into her flesh and the strange knowledge that this is how death took her the first time. She wakes clutching her stomach where she feels the blood seeping out, but her parents tell her there's nothing, she's fine.

There is no blood on her hands when they make her look, but she is far from fine.

* * *

When Nina is fifteen she catches sight of a worn and cracked statue of Osiris in the museum her school has forced her class to visit. There is a pull at her brain that makes her walk over for a closer look.

  
He was the high priest of Osiris. He was _her_ high priest.

  
She can almost see him; smooth and hairless golden skin. Weathered hands hovering over her - why can't he touch her? why won't he touch her? she wants to feel his skin against her skin, his hips between her legs and her fingers tugging him closer, deeper - dark brown eyes that always sought hers out; _she can almost see him!_

  
It is her name called out and hands on her shoulder, shaking her, that break the spell.

  
Her teacher asks if she's all right, does she need to sit down?

  
Nina opens her mouth and a wail comes out.

* * *

That night she dreams of waking to an empty husk and him - her high priest, the high priest of Osiris, the high priest of the god of the underworld and the dead. She wakes as she floats from her own body while he is dragged away.

  
She wants to cry out, but her parents are in the other room talking about trying different therapists and putting her back on medication. So she swallows that foreign word that comes more than the others, and focuses on the remnants of his face.

  
He had loved her. Her high priest of death and afterlife.

  
Nina thinks it's poetic.

* * *

By eighteen she has found ways to cope with the zoning out and the dreams of dying. She smothers the words, sentences, conversations in a language she doesn't understand yet somehow _knows_. She's trained herself to wake up silently, stifling the screams that build up in her chest and push against her ribs when she won't let them out.

  
Her parents send her to therapy once a month. They want her to be okay. They smile in relief every time she tells them she slept great.

  
When she shows an interest in archeology they indulge her. When she shows a desire for Egyptology, they hesitate but eventually support her.

  
They tell themselves she could be a history professor, maybe become a renowned expert in her field. It isn't a solid paying career, but it's something. They comfort themselves with her drive and her dedication.

  
It never occurs to them that the ancient texts she's learning might be the language she used to scream or mutter under her breath. It never occurs to them that her need to know more could be tied with the lives she used to try telling them she once lived.

  
And Nina understands. Part of her resents them, always will; but she understands, in the way that another understood why nobody questioned a tyrant turning her own body into a tool against her.

  
Nobody but her priest.

* * *

At twenty-four she has surpassed her peers. She enjoys the praise and savors the envy. She smiles a cold, knowing smile, because no one could ever imagine the joke that it's all a cheat. That it's insider knowledge propelling her forward.

  
Money is tight - ironic since the schools she's looking into are some of the most expensive - but her parents help as much as they can, and part time jobs and scholarships help make it just barely feasible.

  
And every night she dies.

  
Her priest is fully fleshed out now; his face never leaves her memory. She grows closer to him the more she learns, the more she studies. She remembers the delicious sound of his voice whispering her old name. She can recall the gentle way he touched battle scars this new body doesn't have.

  
Imhotep.

  
It is an insult that he is not as famous as the one that came before him. A curse; his name stricken from any and all records. The fact that the Ancient Egyptians often tried to erase those they did not like from history offers no comfort.

  
She never bothers to find a trace of herself in history. A concubine that killed her pharaoh before she became queen is not one to make it through either.

  
But she _knows_ they were real; knows it the way she knows words long forgotten and understands ancient texts without ever learning them.

  
And every night she dies.

  
Every day she wonders if he lives again too.

* * *

Come age thirty the anger that beat like blood through her first life's veins has set in - but she does not have a society and a religion and a man taken for a god to direct her anger at. She has loneliness and discontent and the realization that she wasted the past fifteen years of her life pursuing not an easy career but a need to know everything.  
She knows everything, give or take, now and the ancient world she once lived in holds even less appeal to her than it did when she was part of it.

  
The confusion and disappointment on her parents' end when she switches careers would be insulting if she hadn't expected it. If she hadn't been used to their confusion of how to treat and react to their daughter. They have never understood; _they will never understand._

  
Nina made peace with it years ago, and doesn't let the questions and the attempts to talk her out of her choices get to her.

  
It is the epiphany that she has wasted time and effort going down a path because she thought it would lead to resolutions to happy endings to finally getting all that she _deserves_ \- has ever deserved and _wanted_ \- that haunts her. It is the realization that she thought she might find him - not in her memories but in the here and the now.

  
It is the way she feels pathetic over chasing after a man tied to her heartaches and wasting what is the best chance she's ever had at life.

  
So Nina finally lets the past go, because death has taken her life too much for her to waste more time on it. She forgets about history and archeology. She does not notice when the dreams stop and mornings are no longer spent trying to warm the icy, phantom pain of death out of her body.

* * *

Thirty-five, and she's happy. Happier than she can remember - _ever_ \- being.

  
She's into linguistics and teaches Portuguese and Arabic, sometimes tutoring in Hebrew, and Latin. She owns a martial arts studio. She goes out for drinks occasionally and sometimes goes home with another woman - because there has only ever been one man that _she chose_ , and all others stare at her with the same possessive look befitting a pharaoh. She remembers being with women before, and wonders if her previous life felt the same way. She's found that she quite likes fighting and fucking.

  
And she no longer dreams of death.

  
And then he walks into her life, memory and fantasy and all her history made flesh. Dark eyes and dark hair with touches of gray and even a beard, and she can't help but stare because somehow she still recognizes him.

  
Her blood runs cold because for a moment she thinks perhaps he is not her high priest of death but Death Himself come for her for good.

  
Then her blood _boils_ because some part of her that is less Nina and more Anck-su-namun wants him and can have him, _can touch him and kiss him and fuck him_ and there is no godking to ruin it all.

  
He smiles and introduces himself, his British accent slightly distorting his otherwise perfect Arabic - and she doesn't catch his name because his name is Imhotep because he is her nameless, erased priest - but he's explaining that he's the new professor at the university. And his class is on ancient religions and how they've shaped modern ones, and she can't help but laugh.

  
Because it's _perfect_.

  
He flashes her a devious grin that is full of hints and history, this Julian, and she knows that he knows.

* * *

 

That night they wind up in the alley behind the university staff's favorite pub, her back pressed up against the rough brick and his hands everywhere because he can touch her without leaving smudges and smears; she bites and she claws because she can finally mark him as hers. They are frantic because they've always been out of time and they've lost so much time - and now they have all the time.

  
They can take it slow later tonight.

  
Or maybe tomorrow.

  
She doesn't care; all she cares about is the feel of him inside her, tight against her, the familiarity of his warm, worn hands on her skin and the newness of his beard tickling her neck and jaw. She cares about the way he shudders when she drags her nails down his back until she feels skin break and the way his hips jerk when she nips roughly at his earlobe, down his neck, on his lip until she draws blood there too.

They linger there slumped against the wall for a long while after they both climax. They don't speak for several minutes, and when they do it's in a language nobody else would understand.

  
And it's not that she has him that makes everything click, it's that she has what she wanted, what was denied her for so long by a king and by gods and by curses.  
Nina has her freedom and the career she wants and the man she desires.

  
When she sleeps, stretched out across her bed and his body, she does not remember dying, but of the moments in between when she _lived_.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written during the early hours of the morning, and I apologize for not expanding on the concept more, but sometimes I have concepts that I have to write something for but can't delve as deeply as I wish. Feedback appreciated. :)


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